[com2kid]

Let's say we live in a world (or small town) where there are only 16 software developers, 8 men, 8 women. 4 of the women are amazing top notch engineers, and so are 4 of the men.

The other 4 men and 4 women are pretty good, but not nearly as good as the top developers.

If a company needs to hire 10 people, and they hire men, they will not be able to fill their entire hiring need.

Obviously a silly policy, and it leaves a lot of good talent on the table.

So instead, the company hires the best it can.

4 amazing women

4 amazing men

1 average woman

1 average man

That is an optimal team given the local talent!

But now let's have the company put in some sexist work place policies. Half the woman leave. Now the company is down to

2 amazing women

4 amazing men

1 average woman

1 average man

to make up for lost numbers, the company is going to have to hire talent that is not as good as the talent that left!

The tl;dr is that discriminatory policies artificially limit the labor pool, reducing the overall efficiency of a company (and the economy of a nation as a whole if looked at broadly enough).

[_ta23]

Given the assumptions the example is obviously correct. What if there are 8 amazing men and 2 amazing women but quotas dictate to hire 50/50?

The other thing is that the labor pool is already too large, lies from the industry notwithstanding.

[com2kid]

> Given the assumptions the example is obviously correct. What if there are 8 amazing men and 2 amazing women but quotas dictate to hire 50/50?

Discussions about quotas are separate from discussions about how discriminatory practices limit hiring pools, and how discriminatory workplace environments decrease the overall level of talent at an organization.

(For what it is worth, the same reasoning being discussed here is why professional sports teams figured out long ago that racism was bad for business.)

Mathematically, if there is a labor shortage, then cutting out part of the hiring pool based on criteria that are not correlated with the qualifications of candidates, will always result in worse hiring decisions being made.

If there is a surplus of talented labor then whoever is doing the hiring can be pretty much as nasty as they want to be and still form a team of pretty good caliber.